Evo Japan's Day 3 Ticket "debacle"

A few hours prior to the link going live to "purchase" tickets for Day 3 of Evo Japan, I noticed something that worried me about the application process. We had to complete an order through a Google Docs form which we would then be invoiced via Paypal at a later point. This isn't the strangest way to take orders, but I knew from that point that the order form would be for single tickets and sure enough when 3AM rolled around (4AM for those south of the border), only one ticket per application could be purchased.

The tickets allocation didn't last long at all. "S" went within the first 2 minutes, followed by "A" before the 5 minute mark, "B" shortly after, and "Standing" was exhausted before the 15 minute mark. The lack of being able to reserve multiple tickets frustrated a lot of players who had been in charge of sourcing tickets for the group they were travelling with. This lead to frustration that the specifics of the ticket sale weren't made public before hand.

I speculated that the way that they did it would allow them to cross reference the player list and allocate seating so that countries would be in clumps rather than all over the place. Others criticised the organisers suggesting that they weren't smart enough to do that sort of thing. It seems that the logic behind what they did was more to screen purchases. It was later confirmed that Japanese applications would be removed from the international ticket sales. The fact that they were looking at IP addresses worried a few of us whom had purchased multiple tickets on the same IP.

Overall, they could have organised this better, but given the volume of international players attending, I think that may have thrown a spanner into the works. At this point in time, I think the only way they could have been able to do this fairly, would have been via a lottery system (but there might be laws against this in Japan). If anything, entry from the start should have carried an optional ticket price. Those whom entered for free to the tournament could only get Day 3 entry if they placed in the finals. This would have allowed entrants to get priority seating.